The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

In previous posts this blog has noted that the disabled have been left out of the civil rights revolution in America, that the disabled are this nation’s largest minority, and that under the reciprocity principle, If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for us. We have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if we do. - Introduction: Social Attitudes and the Disability Cohort

As seen below, the UN has begun addressing these issues.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Prevention of discrimination

The Article 8 of Convention stresses the awareness raising to foster respect for the rights and dignity against discrimination:

1. To raise awareness throughout society, including at the family level, regarding persons with disabilities, and to foster respect for the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities.
2. To combat stereotypes, prejudices and harmful practices relating to persons with disabilities, including those based on sex and age, in all areas of life.
3. To promote awareness of the capacities and contributions of persons with disabilities.
4. Initiating and maintaining effective public awareness campaigns designed: (i) to nurture receptiveness to the rights of persons with disabilities. (ii) to promote positive perceptions and greater social awareness towards persons with disabilities. (iii) to promote recognition of the skills, merits and abilities of persons with disabilities, and of their contributions to workplaceand the labour market.
5. Encouraging all organs of the mass media to portray persons with disabilities in a manner consistent with the purpose of the present Convention.
6. Promoting awareness-training programmes regarding persons with disabilities and the rights of persons with disabilities.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an international human rights treaty of the United Nations intended to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities. Parties to the Convention are required to promote, protect, and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities and ensure that they enjoy full equality under the law. The Convention has served as the major catalyst in the global movement from viewing persons with disabilities as objects of charity, medical treatment and social protection towards viewing them as full and equal members of society, with human rights. It is also the only UN human rights instrument with an explicit sustainable development dimension. The Convention was the first human rights treaty of the twenty-first century.^[1]

The text was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 13 December 2006,^[2] and opened for signature on 30 March 2007. Following ratification by the 20th party, it came into force on 3 May 2008.^[3] As of April 2018, it has 161 signatories and 177 parties, which includes 172 states and the European Union(which ratified it on 23 December 2010 to the extent responsibilities of the member states were transferred to the European Union).^[4] In December 2012, a vote in the United States Senate fell six votes short of the two-thirds majority required for ratification.^[5] The Convention is monitored by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_Persons_with_Disabilities

Neither democratic, nor orderly, nor civilized

From at least as far back as Bush v. Gore, which substituted the Court selecting a Republican over the democratic vote for Gore, extremist rightism has been resorting to methods which are neither democratic, nor orderly, nor civilized.

A recent example: The occupant of the White House recently excoriated his own justice department:

Trump tweet: “Two long running, Obama era, investigations of  two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff......”

As David Graham said,

"Trump’s tweet is so blunt one is almost tempted to look for deeper meaning. He’s saying the U.S. Department of Justice should be most concerned not with enforcement of laws but with aiding the Republican Party. Plenty of politicians are corrupt, but few announce it proudly from their Twitter accounts."

Here is a POTUS openly advocating the partisan use of the criminal justice system to aid his party, and in so doing, subverting the rule of law and violating the Oath of Office, in which he swore to defend the Constitution. This is neither democratic, nor orderly, nor civilized.

Yesterday the New York Times published an article in which a member of the White House staff reported that they and many of their colleagues are acting to protect the country from erratic, impulsive, and irrational acts by their master. David Frum and others have accused them of fomenting a constitutional crisis or a "coup against Trump," saying that they should use the formal means of the 25th Amendment or impeachment to protect the nation.

But it has been apparent for months that neither the House, nor the Senate, nor the Vice President will perform their constitutional duties to protect their country from this toxic presidency so long as they are getting activist judges and tax cuts for billionaires. The rule by minority and by unelected judges which they are now ramming down our throats will foment a calamitous backlash which will be neither democratic, nor orderly, nor civilized.

The extra-constitutional undermining of the current pretender to the throne is what happens when the House, the Senate, the Vice President, and the nominal chief executive all abdicate their constitutional duties. The inevitable has begun to happen. Neither democratic, nor orderly, nor civilized.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

The purpose of this blog, from a 2013 post

Unpublished Remarks from a Disabled Person on the West Coast, Part 2

Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul - Walt Whitman, Preface to first edition of Leaves of Grass

To be decent, every person has to make their own ethical decisions. . . . If you are conformist, you almost certainly violate universal ethical standards of decency.

Then they would ... thrust him out of the house, spitting on him and throwing stones as he ran away. ... He let it out and they all turned against him immediately. - A "sin-eater," described in Master and Commander: (vide infra)

She is looking straight at me with a grim, angry expression, so that I almost recoil. You should be ashamed, it seems to say. Unpublished Remarks from a Disabled Person on the West Coast, Part 1 

The following were conveyed to the authors of this blog by one of the stigmatized disabled:

From the first article in this series, hopefully it is beginning to be apparent what the purposes of the series are.

One purpose is to give a report from inside on one of the fronts in the battle against prejudicial discrimination.

Another purpose is a sociological perspective. Social identity is what makes ordinary human life work. For a person to have what Erving Goffman called a "spoiled identity" may be to "reduce his life chances."
 
  A third purpose is to argue that all prejudice is the same prejudice and all discrimination is the same discrimination. The enormous harm of prejudicial discrimination throughout the ages is the history of man's inhumanity to man. Prejudice is too monstrous to be a tool for any honorable purpose.

  A fourth purpose is to argue that such middle-class values as the idea of a common humanity; the idea of a connection with the past and the future and of a responsibility to our ancestors and our descendants; the idea of civility and of respect, so far as possible, for all people regardless of what group they are thought to belong to; the belief in uplift; and the idea that political freedom comes when "we the people," all of us with one spirit work together for the public good--to argue that these were favorable to the stigmatized. The contrary values of the sixties, in particular the tendency to frame solutions in terms of group identity, have been harmful to those with a spoiled identity.
 
  A fifth purpose is to draw attention to a pervasive double standard in discrimination. For example, the term "harelip" is as ugly and defamatory as the n-word, yet even when it clearly is being used to marginalize and disenfranchise those with cleft lips and palates, as in the phrase "if it harelips the governor," progressives stand calmly silent.
 
  A sixth purpose is to argue that "harelip" is the symbolic birth defect, the one which William Shakespeare and Mark Twain cite, and that those so stigmatized have a corresponding classic symbolic role, the scapegoat, the "sin eater,"* as Patrick O'Brien says in Master and Commander: in Wikipedia, "one who is blamed for misfortunes, often as a way of distracting attention from the real causes." [Ed. Note: The current Wikipedia no longer says this. It does say: 

The biblical Jesus has been interpreted as a universal archetype for sin-eaters, offering his life to purify all of humanity of their sins.

 For the Disabled Archetype in myth, see the following post, This is the Son of Kings.]

 A seventh purpose is to draw attention to widespread prejudices, some with impressive scholarly pedigrees, which could contribute to the double standard mentioned above, which serve as the unspoken and unexamined rationale for targeting the stigmatized: "In a certain state it is indecent to go on living," the influential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. "To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society."
 
  An eighth purpose is to ask you to imagine the life of the stigmatized. Would a complete stranger attack you as soon as he sees you? Three such cases (out of many) are described in the first article, and as seen above no less a personage than Nietzsche argues that this is legitimate. What would be the cumulative effect, if you went through each day never knowing who would turn on you? If you came to realize that in many cases where for others the answer is "yes," for you it is "no," would you have the same hopes, the same aspirations, the same goals, the same confidence as you do now? Imagine an existence characterized by reduced life chances.
 
  A ninth purpose is to draw attention to the dual nature of identity. There is the identity we have by ascription, which Goffman describes as "spoiled." But other sociologists, such as John Murray Cuddihy, have argued that a feature of liberal modernity is that individuals have their character by achievement and not by ascription. Randall Kennedy, in "My Race Problem -- And Ours," [see Defining Liberalism: Randall Kennedy's 'My Race Problem—And Ours', My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours] argued that "a brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it." For the stigmatized, there are terrible consequences attendant on accepting the way many persons see them. A difficult choice is forced on them: To accept the "profound contempt" as their due; or to reject it at the possible cost of being accused of failing to know their place. As a friend once told me, when someone once asked him, "As an outsider, what do you think of the human race?" he answered, "It gives me a valuable perspective." 

(*)From Master and Commander: "I have a curious case ..."

What is his name?
Cheslin: he has a hare lip. ...
Yet he has been of singular service to men and women, in his time.
In what way?
He was a sin-eater. ...
Will you tell me about him? ...
When a man died Cheslin would be sent for; there would be a piece of bread on the dead man's breast; he would eat it, taking the sins upon himself. Then they would push a silver piece into his hand and thrust him out of the house, spitting on him and throwing stones as he ran away. ... He let it out and they all turned against him immediately.

Do people with disabilities exist so that the works of God should be revealed?

In reference to the previous post, which quotes the biblical John 9:2,

"And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?", it’s been pointed out that the following verse, John 9:3,

"Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him," suggests that disabled people exist to provide an example, as contrasted with people who exist in and of themselves.

That is a problem for civil rights advocates, who hold that all are born equal, and that the disadvantaged are not second class citizens whose purpose is to be useful to others.

John 9:3 does not fit the message of Jesus of Nazareth, that God is kind, generous, loving, and good; and that heaven cares when a sparrow falls.

The Jesus Seminar has concluded that some of the statements attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) were probably not actually said by him; and that none of the statements in the gospel of John were things he said.

There are parts of scripture which are to be rejected, such as the passage from Leviticus below, which sets the rules for what Lincoln called "property in man," (slavery):

[Lev 25:44-46 KJV] 44 Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, [shall be] of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. 45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that [are] with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. 46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit [them for] a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.

Likewise, John 9:3 does not give biblical authority to disability discrimination.

Did Oedipus harm his parents because he knew they rejected him?

A follow up to "This is the Son of Kings," an earlier post on Oedipus:

"Nor is that other point to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club feet …" - Sir Francis Bacon

This is a blog about disability. The disability most targeted, most subject to denial, and most vulnerable to blaming the victim, is birth defect (John 9:2 “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born thus?” shows that this sort of thinking has existed for millennia.).

Two thousand years of mainstream literary criticism has accommodated Sophocles’ mystifying premise: Fate, Oracle, foreordained by the gods, in which Swollen Foot’s attempt to escape the injustice of “the way things are” is maligned as “hubris.”

Oedipus had the pride of royal blood. The central moral fact of Sophocles’ play, missed by two millennia of straight critics, is that the reason Swollen Foot does not know who he is, is that his own parents tried to kill him when he was a helpless baby.

The straightforward version of the plot, before Sophocles skipped over the possibility that it was about the fury of a disabled royal who effected retribution for attempted murder, is that Oedipus knew. His agency in the catastrophes which befell his “mother” and “father” arose from the righteous wrath of a prince against parents who denied him his heritage.

Bacon saw through Sophocles’ sleight of hand, describing Oedipus’ condition as “club feet,” unmistakably a birth defect, and not maiming, as some say Sophocles would have it.

A reasonable translation of "Oidipous Tyrannos," following Bacon’s interpretation, is "Clubfoot the Ruler." When a drama has a name of this form, as with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" or even "Beauty and the Beast," there is a certain hint as to how the plot will go.